On Monday, January 26, Associations of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists (hereon ACAMS) held its Third Annual AML Risk Management Conference at The Conrad Hotel in downtown New York. Over the course of this week, summaries and takeaways from the key notes and panel discussions will be shared in this blog.

Regulators like to see consistency because it shows the effort an institution is putting into trying to be compliant.

Communicate to Boards of Directors that OCC would like to see more focus on compliance from them

Alert Suppression is okay and critical to executing priorities, but the alerts should be logged and revisited to keep the compliance programs up-to-date with the changing environment both ex-firm and intra-firm.

FINRA does not target individuals, though individuals will face penalties if found willfully unaware or intentionally non-compliant. FINRA focuses on systemic risks to protect investors.

FinCEN does not target individuals, especially trying to avoid dissuading the most talented compliance professionals from fleeing the most difficult problems.

Intra-firm talent development is key to today’s labor market where supply of veteran compliance officers are small compared to demand.

OCC intends to staff lead experts on all exams in the future.

The new OCC Exam Manual, published November 11, 2014, does not have much substantive changes, mostly it is an administrative update to make sure changes to exams since the last major update are documented.

About the Author: Marcus Maltempo is a compliance professional with more than a decade of experience helping banks, law firms and clients manage investigations and regulatory responses.
He tweets @MoneyCompliance